A Profane Wit
The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochesterby James William Johnson

Book Review by Rob Hardy

If you like your poetry naughty, you donít have to resort to
collections of bawdy limericks. You can in good conscience take up the
work of one of the most amazing personalities who ever made rhymes, John
Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. Along with using all the words and
subjects that would these days force him onto satellite radio, Rochester
filled his lively poetry with classical allusions and vast learning, as
well as commenting on current affairs. Dr. Johnson was one who could
surely take offense at the tone of Rochesterís work, but didnít:
"In all his works there is sprightliness and vigour, and every
where may be found tokens of a mind which study might have carried to
excellence; what more can be expected from a life spent in ostentatious
contempt of regularity, and ended before the abilities of many other men
began to be displayed?" This extraordinarily irregular and short
life is taken up in A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of
Rochester (University of Rochester [ha!] Press) by James William
Johnson. A large volume which draws upon sources previously unavailable
to biographers, it is a serious academic evaluation of a spectacular
poet.

Rochester was born in 1647. His father had been a faithful courtier
to Charles I during the latterís exile, earning the Rochester earldom.
He was absent on royal duties most of the time, and then died when
Rochester was but ten. Much more influential was Rochesterís mother,
an ambitious, pious woman who pursued preferment and money with skill:
"The Countessís business morality was typical of the Restoration
period; she differed from her contemporaries in nothing but her
managerial acumen." She was not above using as an ally her cousin
Barbara Palmer, who was pregnant with the child of King Charles II when
the king married elsewhere in 1662. By such stratagems, she provided for
Rochester the bride Elizabeth Mallet, with whom he had a marriage of
passion and growing mutual love. Especially in the beginning, there were
clashes over money, the role of in-laws, and religion, and Rochester was
not the type to count on for fidelity. They were, through it all,
devoted to each other, and produced three children upon whom Rochester
doted.

He absorbed a Puritan doctrine from his mother and the tutors she
hired for him, and despite all the evidence of his subsequent rakish
behavior, he never shook off the imbued religious emotions and guilt. At
Oxford he entered Wadham College and began his sexual life, perhaps with
homosexual debauchery (Wadham was known as "Sodom"). His tutor
may have initiated him into it, but also helped the young man as an
upcoming classicist and poet. He began to write poetic tributes to King
Charles, with the purpose of reminding the King that he was Lord Wilmotís
son. It worked; the King started an annual pension, and Rochester
eventually entered the Kingís service, bravely doing naval duty in the
Dutch wars and more importantly becoming a Gentleman of the Kingís
Bedchamber. Rochester had a reputation for being able to seduce virgins,
while the King preferred experienced lovers; Rochester dutifully took on
the role of gathering maidenheads and instructing the women in the
techniques of love in preparation for the Kingís bed. The King was for
Rochester a father figure, and Rochester spent much of his life trying
to stay within his good graces. He was not always successful; he
remained irrepressible, and earned the Kingís wrath many times. One
drunken night, the King wanted to see a poem of Rochesterís that had
been widely circulated, and Rochester handed him the text of "On
King Charles", which, while it called the King a "merry
monarch", also alluded to the Kingís eagerness in coitus and
noted, "His scepter and his prick are of a length / And she that
plays with one may sway the other." (These are among the milder
lines.) Rochester was expelled from Whitehall for that one. He was taken
back, of course, but he did not repress himself. Late in his life, he
again inflamed his protector by noting that the King would copiously
re-tell stories to those who were long accustomed to hearing the same
tales before. A contemporary noted that Rochester "said he wondered
to see a man have so good a memory as to repeat the same story without
losing the least circumstance, and yet not remember that he had told it
to the same person the day before."

Johnson lists the successive liaisons with mistresses, and quotes
from the poems assigned to them. Rochester treated his wife with respect
(if one excuses the infidelities) but often treated mistresses with
meanness and contempt. There is a strong strain of misogyny in his
poetry, to the point of brutishness; in "On Mistress Willis",
Rochester commemorates a famous brothel-keeper, with the first of five
verses:

Against the charms our ballocks have,

How weak the human skill is,

Since they can make a man a slave,

To such a bitch as Willis.

Rochester condemned women for lust, hypocrisy, biological filth, and
capacity to spread disease. There have been moralists who have thought
that his obscene satires were not written to stimulate but rather to
disgust and thus reduce desire. Johnson also shows that Rochester, less
frequently, was able to write mildly feminist verses and in his plays
give empathy to the female perspective.

Rochesterís end was entirely satisfactory to moralists. He died at
thirty-three, consumed by venereal disease, and he also had a deathbed
conversion, capping a life of paganism and doubt with an ostensible
acceptance of standard Protestantism. The conversion of this prodigal
became a staple of sermonizers and pamphleteers, who thus had the
paradoxical duty of explaining, in order to show contrast, just how bad
a fellow Rochester had been. They undoubtedly drew upon exaggerated
stories of his behavior, but his life was full enough of scandal. His
poems and plays illuminate a rowdy time, and even the royal take on it.
There was even more he could have told, and historians must ever regret
that his mother arranged after his death that his History of the
Intrigues of the Court of Charles II should be promptly burned.
Johnsonís intricate biography makes plain many of the intrigues of the
time, and quotes well from Rochesterís writings, although those really
interested in the works will be delighted to have the Penguin Classics
edition of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: Selected Works handy as
they go through the biography. In the poem "Tunbridge Wells",
find these lines about the odd persons and events at a famous watering
hole, which could well do for the poet himself:

Bless me, thought I, what thing is man, that thus
In all his shapes he is ridiculous:
Ourselves with noise of reason we do please
In vain: humanityís our worst disease.

A Profane Wit:The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester(University of Rochester Press; November 2004; ISBN 1580461700)
Available at: Amazon.com†/
Amazon UK†/
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